Greetings from Kansas City, Missouri!

I’m here this morning to announce that Google’s ultra high-speed broadband service is coming to the City of Fountains – Kansas City, Missouri. In March we were on the other side of the river, announcing plans to bring ultra high-speeds to Kansas City, Kansas. We promised that would be the start – not the end – of our efforts, and we’re thrilled to be able to take this next step and expand the project to the broader region. Residents of both KCMO and KCK will have access to our service starting in 2012.

We’ll be working closely with Mayor Sly James, the city government, and Kansas City Power & Light (KCP&L) – the first investor-owned utility in the world to take on this kind of effort – to deliver Internet speeds 100 times faster than what most people have access to today.

It’s fitting that this morning’s announcement will take place at Kansas City’s historic Union Station. Beautifully restored in the 1990s, this landmark unites the region and reminds us how infrastructure can drive innovation and opportunity. We hope to achieve the same result by connecting both KCMO and KCK with ultra high-speeds.

Google took on this project because we’re committed to moving the web forward. Just as the move from dial-up to broadband led to new and unpredictable innovations, we believe ultra high-speed bandwidth will push the web to even greater heights – and we couldn’t imagine a better place to start than the Kansas City region. With or without Google Fiber, this area is a hub for technology, innovation, and entrepreneurship, with a diverse population that represents the rest of the country.

Going forward, we’ll continue to talk to other cities about the possibility of us bringing Google Fiber to their communities. For now, we can’t wait to see how the Kansas City region comes together to benefit from this kind of connectivity.



Posted by Milo Medin, Vice President, Access Services



category: city_news

Today we’re taking the wraps off our new Google Fiber Blog, which we hope will become your first stop for the latest news from the team working to deliver ultra high-speed broadband.

In the coming weeks and months, we’ll offer up posts on what we’re up to in Kansas City, who we are, and how we think about broadband infrastructure. We also plan to share more on what we learn from you – including what applications you want to see and how you think gigabit speeds will change the way you use the web. We want this blog to be a one-stop shop, so while we’re only just now launching, we’ve included below several months’ worth of prior posts dating back to our first fiber announcement in February 2010.

We hope you’ll check back often to read the latest updates from our team. We’re also very interested in reading what you have to say, so we’ve enabled comments. We invite you to share your comments on any post below – we’ll be reading every one, and we’ll be doing our best to respond.

Posted by Kevin Lo, GM, Google Access



category: company_news